Wikijunior:Languages/Sign languages

Sign languages are primarily used by people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Many other people learn sign language in order to be able to communicate easily with family members or friends that are deaf or hard of hearing. Sign languages may also be learned in order to be an official sign language interpreter.

Sign languages are not written as often as other languages, instead written forms of other languages are used. For example, someone that communicates using American Sign Language would usually read and write written English since that is the dominant language around them. Many sign languages do however, have their own specific written form.

Yes! Sign languages have all of the important features that other languages have that make them languages. For example, they have their own grammar, phonemes, and use of inflection. Someone signing a language uses the same parts of the brain as someone speaking it — sign languages have all of the same basic pieces as spoken languages but they are expressed differently.

phomeme — one of the basic sounds (or in this case, parts) out of which words are made.

inflection — the way words change form to show things like singular/plural or past/present/future.

Sometimes when communicating with somebody who doesn't speak the same language as you, you can get your point across by acting things out and making signs with your hands. Does this mean that sign language is universal? Not quite. Just as there are many spoken languages, there are many signed languages (for example, American Sign Language and French Sign Language). Interestingly, signed languages have a different history than spoken ones. For example, American Sign Language is much closer to French Sign Language than it is to British Sign Language!

Also, since sign languages tend to mix a lot of miming and acting along with the actual language, deaf people often have an easier time making themselves understood with other deaf people, even if they don't "speak" the same language. This also helps them to learn each other's languages. So deaf people might have an easier time communicating across the language barrier even if their respective languages are very different.

Sign languages are used all over the world. There are many official sign languages that have significant numbers of speakers. Even where official sign languages are not known (and even where they are), "home sign" develops where speakers communicate with signs that make sense between the speakers.

What makes sign languages interesting is that they are often very different from spoken languages, even in the same countries or communities. For example, in American English, we might say, "When are you going to school?", whereas in French Sign Language, we would instead sign something like "When you school go when?"

Learning a sign language is really like learning a second language, not just learning signs for the words you already know. In the same way, translating a sign language to a spoken language involves accounting for grammar differences in much the same way that translating from one spoken language to another does.

Clayton Valli (1951–2003) was a prominent deaf linguist and American Sign Language (ASL) poet whose work helped further to legitimize ASL and introduce people to the richness of American Sign Language literature.